Be Transparent – You should always disclose to your subscribers if you are receiving a commission for promoting a product or service for honesty, transparency and even legal reasons. In the United States, the FTC requires that you disclose any payment that you receive for endorsing a product or service. You can read the FTC’s endorsement guidelines at http://1.usa.gov/1FRMynQ.

Adam Enfroy is the Affiliate Partnerships Manager at BigCommerce. With 10+ years of experience in digital marketing, ecommerce, selling online courses, and web development, he is passionate about leveraging the right strategic partnerships and software to scale digital growth. Adam lives in Austin, TX and writes about affiliate marketing and building your online influence on his personal blog.

Through our global affiliate network, we empower marketers to engage shoppers across the entire consumer journey. Affiliate success comes down to partnerships — we connect advertisers with publishers to reach new audiences and influence repeat purchases. Our solutions create a holistic strategy that delivers proven incremental revenue and is continually optimized for performance.
When beginning your affiliate marketing career, you’ll want to cultivate an audience that has very specific interests. This allows you to tailor your affiliate campaigns to that niche, increasing the likelihood that you’ll convert. By establishing yourself as an expert in one area instead of promoting a large array of products, you’ll be able to market to the people most likely to buy the product.
Greg Jeffries has a strong fine arts background with a passion for marketing. He's been involved in Internet marketing for over six years now, and loves teaching and helping others succeed. He's made money with nearly every system and strategy that you can think of or that exists online, but a few of his strengths are in the areas of: listbuilding/email marketing, info product creation, paid traffic (Facebook ads), and search engine optimization.

I’ll admit it…I love Oprah Winfrey. This woman has made an empire out of her daytime talk show. What amazes me most is her book recommendations. If an author gets on her show, it’s GUARANTEED he or she is going to sell a bunch of copies. I nicknamed the presell email, “The Oprah Winfrey” because it provides great content while making a strong push for a particular product.

Both affiliate marketing and dropshipping require similar skill sets. To be successful in either you’ll need to be able to market your products by creating ads and driving traffic to landing pages where customers will buy the product. This might not sound too difficult, but it can take a while to start seeing any significant number of people actually buying products using your site or links.
Let’s say you have a promotions page where you’re promoting a product via affiliate links. If you currently get 5,000 visits/month at a 2% conversion rate, you have 100 referrals. To get to 200 referrals, you can either focus on getting 5,000 more visitors, or simply increasing the conversion rate to 4%. Which sounds easier? Instead of spending months on blogging, SEO, and social media marketing to get more traffic, you just have to increase the conversion rate by 2%. This can include landing page optimization, testing your calls-to-action, and having a conversion rate optimization strategy in place. By testing and optimizing your site, you’ll get far better results with much less effort.

But I think the biggest deciding factor in this, goes back to the site as a whole and all of the other posts. Are the genuine? Is the blogger constantly trying to push products? I’d like to think I’ve been doing this long enough that my audience knows I’m not out to make a quick buck – and I think even relatively new bloggers can prove this based on their other content.

Dropshipping is where you curate and list products on your site. So in this example, you create a store of products but you are the middleman. You take orders, handle payment processing and customer service issues but the manufacturer ships the product for you. So instead of having a warehouse and holding product and all the costs associated with that, you partner with a drop shipper who stocks and ships the inventory. You get to set your own product price. So you basically buy wholesale and mark up the prices. Suppliers will suggest a retail price and you need to see what similar products are selling for so that you don’t price yourself out of the market. But, you get to decide what you want to charge!
Avoid jargon, buzzwords, and acronyms. Writing copy for emails or landing pages is different than writing the academic research paper. Marketers should cut down on flowery language wherever possible. Use a conversational tone. Check your text with the Hemingway App. Don’t worry; replacing big words with common synonyms won’t make you look uneducated. Most people in the United States read at a 7th-8th-grade level.
Yada yada yada….for those o f us who know absolutely NOTHING about marketing, how to manually create a webpage/blog, understand terms like SEO and MANY others that you and others use….not to mention we have no real knowledge of what it takes to write a successful blog or the tools you need to make a good YouTube video (yes, you need a video camera and a GOOD microphone among other things to make a GOOD video); those of us who don’t know that it it
This is Simon, thank you for your post, it is very helpful for me. However, we are a lighting company, and we are plan to try the Affiliate Website to increase our sale. But it seem that there are many different Affiliate website to be chose and some of them also need pay some fee to begin, so as we just begin to do this, which website is your recommend ?
In effect, VigLink works as the middleman between a publisher (blogger) and merchants by scanning the publisher’s content and automatically creating links to publishers that are chosen “in real time” based on their payout/conversation rates. This makes VigLink a very hands-off affiliate program for publishers who prefer to focus on content instead of managing their affiliate links.
Some commentators originally suggested that affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself. For instance, if a website contains information pertaining to publishing a website, an affiliate link leading to a merchant's internet service provider (ISP) within that website's content would be appropriate. If a website contains information pertaining to sports, an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods website may work well within the context of the articles and information about sports. The goal, in this case, is to publish quality information on the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites.

Small blogger? I work with publishers of all sizes and bigger doesn’t necessarily translate to more commissions. Often smaller bloggers have more engagement from their audience compared to their larger counterparts. I’ve experienced this first hand too. Recently I was a top earning affiliate for a course launch – alongside bloggers with audiences 10-40x bigger than mine.

Be Transparent – You should always disclose to your subscribers if you are receiving a commission for promoting a product or service for honesty, transparency and even legal reasons. In the United States, the FTC requires that you disclose any payment that you receive for endorsing a product or service. You can read the FTC’s endorsement guidelines at http://1.usa.gov/1FRMynQ.
With the ability to rank organically in search engine queries, bloggers excel at increasing a seller’s conversions. The blogger samples the product or service and then writes a comprehensive review that promotes the brand in a compelling way, driving traffic back to the seller’s site. The blogger is awarded for his or her influence spreading the word about the value of the product, helping to improve the seller’s sales.
Never send an email without making sure it’s working properly. What looks good in your inbox can look broken or mangled in someone else’s. Use tools that can help you with testing your SPAM score, deliverability and the rendering of your email. There are plenty of free or freemium solutions that provide screenshots of your email in dozens of different email platforms.

Both affiliate marketing and dropshipping allow you to get a small business up and running with relatively low costs when compared to other business opportunities. Because you can work from home, you won’t need to factor in things like renting a commercial space or buying and storing stock. You can look start out fairly strongly with around $3000, which for many won’t require taking out risky bank loans.

We promote companies that pay us as little as $10 a referral to ones that literally pay us hundreds of dollars a referral. You might scoff at $10 a referral when you think you can make much more than that per dropship sale, but we make more from JUST ONE LANDING PAGE at $10 a referral than most people make in a year. That is just one landing page – we have hundreds. That is the potential we are talking about. Limitless.